“Not regularly,” he said.
Many of Seven’s virtues seemed like things that might have been advantageous in another place and time. He had many of the qualities Maoris prize in a man—lateral thinking, independence, bravery, tremendous cool—and I sometimes thought it was a pity that he hadn’t been born two centuries earlier. He was a great avoider of implications and seemed to consider it unmanly to appear too interested in what things meant. He had no taste at all for competition—except, of course, in sports—and he never did anything just because it was what he was “supposed” to do. He had a disregard for convention so complete (I still remember the first time he drove up onto the sidewalk in order to get around some obstacle in the road) that it could only have been a form of rebellion in anyone else, though in him it seemed more like a kind of innocence. He was easy to please, difficult to anger, and utterly uncritical. He never judged others and seemed not to care—or even particularly to notice—if they judged him.
But the thing about him that I found most intriguing was the way he thought (or didn’t think) about the future. Seven was constitutionally incapable of planning: he was a fatalist and an optimist at the same time. If he set out for someplace without directions, he would find it anyway by chance. If he wanted to go somewhere crowded—a hotel by the sea on a holiday weekend, say—he would just turn up and there would be a sudden cancellation. He never decided where he was going, he just ended up wherever he was. He could never commit to a meal in advance, because how could he be sure, when the time came, that he’d be hungry?
While I adored this dedication to spontaneity in the abstract, in practice it could be trying. I was inclined to want to survey the field, to consider the options, to make informed, rational decisions about what ought to be done. But this involved projecting possible outcomes, something Seven was either unwilling or unable to do. If, for example, we were traveling and arrived at dinnertime in a country town, I would want to look at each of the restaurants before choosing one in which to eat. Seven would pick the first one that he came to. “Some people map out their lives like an arrow,” he once told me. “I just wait for an arrow to drop in front of me.
It was not, I came to think, merely a matter of impulsivity, but of a different way of looking at the world. I had been raised, for example, to believe that if a conflict arose between what I wanted and the expectations of others, I didn’t have to fall on my sword, but I certainly had to consider it. But this kind of thinking was entirely foreign to Seven. It was not that he was unwilling to do things for others; on the contrary, he was generous to a fault. But the idea of doing something as a matter of duty—rather than of choice—seemed to him nonsensical. It was almost as though the idea offended him, as though in subordinating his own impulses he would be giving way to some kind of oppression, as though maintaining his right to do as he wanted were a matter of personal pride.
To be fair, Seven extended this ideal to everyone and never expected other people to modify their behavior on his behalf. He was content to let the chips fall where they may and assumed that everyone else was also. And over time I came to feel that this lightness of being defined him as completely as any single characteristic could.
It is, of course, one of the great clichés of European colonialism that natives can be distinguished from colonizers by the way they think about time. We still speak of “island time,” a kind of slow time or even no time, but the idea has antecedents in Western thinking that go back at least to the ancient Greeks. There were numerous legends in the ancient world of lands of perpetual summer where miraculous fertility gave abundance without toil and people passed their days in pleasure, free from tyranny, disease, and war. Such stories belong to an enduring, maybe even universal, mythology of escape—from work, from duty, from cold and hunger, from time itself, from death. For most of history these are understood to be imaginary places. But every once in a while they get mapped onto something actual and people suppose for a moment that these mythic Elysiums are real.
Tahiti lies in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just south of the equator, almost equidistant from Australia and Peru. It is the largest of what are known as the Society Islands, so named by Cook for their close proximity to one another in the middle of a large and largely empty sea. Tahiti had been occupied by Polynesians for perhaps two thousand years when it came to the attention of the European world in the mid-eighteenth century. It was discovered in 1767 by Captain Samuel Wallis of the Dolphin, in the course of an expedition to the South Seas.
Wallis reached Tahiti ten months after setting out from England. He’d had an arduous crawl through the Straits of Magellan, seventeen weeks with the wind in his teeth in the narrow, perilous waters. Parted from his supply ship along the way, he was short of everything, especially food, and his crew was suffering badly from scurvy. The first sign of relief came in the form of a scattering of low coral atolls—the Tuamotu Archipelago. A few days later the first of the high islands appeared on the horizon. It was a sight that “made us all rejoice,” wrote the master of the Dolphin, “and filled us with the greatest hopes imaginable.”
Tahiti, in the eighteenth century, was everything that Europe was not. It was warm and tranquil, salubrious, unspoiled. Food fell literally from the trees: coconuts, breadfruit, bananas, and vi-apple, also known as Tahitian quince. There was fish and pork in abundance and the valleys and gardens produced wild ginger, sugarcane, taro, and yams. Polynesians generally conformed to European ideals of physical beauty, but many travelers considered Tahitians the most beautiful people they had ever seen. The islanders were tall and well-proportioned with regular features and long dark hair. Early observers remarked their fondness for bathing, the “singular beauty of their teeth,” and their habit of dressing their hair with oil scented with “something like roses.” They had no predators and few pests, and the islands they inhabited were not plagued by the diseases of crowded, unsanitary European cities, or fever-ridden tropical ports like Batavia, where so many Europeans died. No wonder that to the tired, grubby, hungry sailors who discovered it, Tahiti seemed a paradise on earth.
Wallis and his crew stayed five weeks and sailed on, observing regretfully that some would have remained if they could have been sure of a ship to come and get them in a few years’ time. They claimed the island for the British Crown, naming it in honor of King George III. But before Wallis could even get home to tell the story, Tahiti was discovered and claimed again—this time by France. Unaware that he’d been preceded, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville took possession of Tahiti in the name of his Most Christian Majesty, Louis XV and, in a fit of Gallic enthusiasm, named the island New Cythera after the place at which Aphrodite had risen from the sea. As Bougainville, too, took his leave, he remarked that the worst consequence of shipwreck in this remote corner of the world “would have been to pass the remainder of our days on an isle adorned with all the gifts of nature, and to exchange the sweets of the mother-country, for a peaceable life, exempted from cares.”
It was not long before news of these discoveries began circulating back in Europe. The first published account of Tahiti, written anonymously and printed in France, told of an island of haunting beauty inhabited by people who lived “in peace among themselves and know neither hatred, quarrels, dissension, nor civil war.” They did no work, they had no industry, they knew nothing of private property or trade. They ate and drank whenever they wanted, had sex with whomever they liked, and danced “naturally and without any set order.” The theme of the narrative was innocence, sometimes negatively portrayed as backwardness, sometimes positively as freedom from constraint. But at the heart of it all was the observation that “the New Cytherians know nothing of the duration or of the origin of their existence, and, caring little about the past, concern themselves only with the present.”
It has always struck me as one of the great ironies of this particular moment in history that the apparent discovery of a people for whom time did not exist should coincide with a frantic rac
e in Europe to develop a seagoing clock. At issue was the problem of longitude. Mariners had long been able to tell just how far north or south they were at any given moment, but it was almost impossible to figure out where they were from east to west. There were complex calculations that could help but few knew how to perform them. There were astronomical observations that would answer but they could not be taken at sea. A clock—or chronometer, as it was called—that would allow a comparison between local time anywhere in the world and that of the prime meridian (Greenwich) would tell sailors in an instant where they were. But until the middle of the eighteenth century, no clock had been invented that could survive the rigors of being at sea.
Here, then, we have the basic dichotomy. On the one hand, Europeans, energetic, obsessed with progress, relentlessly focused on what lies ahead, and on the other, islanders, who know what it means to be here now, indolent maybe, inconstant perhaps, whimsical, capricious, impulsive, rash. It was this character of fickleness, wrote Bougainville, “which constantly amazed us. Everything strikes them, yet nothing fixes their attention. It seems as if the least reflection is a toilsome labour for them, and that they are still more averse to the exercises of the mind than to those of the body … I shall not, however, accuse them of want of understanding.”
It would be easy to portray these depictions of Tahiti as the workings of a fevered European mind. There is so much that is inaccurate about them. It was not true, for instance, that the Tahitians knew nothing of war. They had, in fact, attacked the Dolphin initially, pelting the ship with volleys of stones and challenging the sailors to come ashore with “many wanton gestures.” And it was clear, even to the earliest visitors, that they frequently engaged in battle with their neighbors. Similarly, while there were elements of communalism in Polynesian society, there were also rigid social hierarchies and degrees of privilege and access to wealth. There was work, there was trouble, there was even disease. And, as for social mores, well, as the long-running argument over Margaret Mead’s account of adolescent Samoan sexuality attests, Polynesian societies are as rife as any with rules about who can sleep with whom.
But if there is spin in these early descriptions, there are also flickers of what feels like truth. Eighteenth-century European observers were influenced by political convictions, including a growing impatience with a remote and narcissistic aristocracy, and by popular philosophical ideas like those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And there is certainly a sense in which they tended to perceive only that which confirmed the views they already held. But the eighteenth century was also the age of empiricism, the first perhaps genuinely scientific age. It was full of encounters with new plants, new animals, and new landscapes, hundreds of which were enthusiastically cataloged by adventurous, curious, and comparatively dispassionate Europeans.
Voyagers grappled with all kinds of things they had never seen—kangaroos, icebergs, giant ferns, bottle brushes, molten lava—and made conscientious efforts to document them as faithfully as they could. They were scrupulous observers who took copious notes and brought artists along on their voyages to make visual records of what they discovered. Of course, they were selective and mistook much of what they found—one has only to look at the earliest drawings of a kangaroo to see how wrong they could get it. Of course, they tried to fit their experiences into the framework of what they understood. But within these limitations they still came back with reports of the world, not just as they had expected to find it, but as they had actually seen it with their own eyes.
A large part of my training as a graduate student had been aimed at making me skeptical about everything Europeans had reported in the course of empire’s long march. And the claim that Polynesians—not only Tahitians but the Tongans, Samoans, Marquesans, and Maoris who were their close cultural kin—lived in some kind of continuous present was exactly the sort of thing one might have expected. Europeans were always representing themselves as models of Apollonian reason and order and depicting everyone else (Orientals, natives, islanders) as feckless and bizarre. But what was funny about living with Seven was the way these musty paradigms, so easy to dismiss in theory, would periodically spring to life. Those elements of communalism? Somehow they seemed related to the fact that Seven gave everything away. That particular kind of physical beauty? It was there before my eyes. And as for that business about time—are you kidding?
One day he said to me out of the blue, “I think about food all the time.”
“You do?” I said, finding this hard to imagine.
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Well, I think I do,” he said. “Maybe I’m just hungry right now.”
6
The Venus
While we were living down by the beach, the replica of Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, came to Melbourne. I had seen the notice in the paper and I made Seven go out early with me to stake out a spot on the esplanade where we could watch the ship sail up into Port Philip Bay. Port Philip is a long bay, about thirty miles from the heads to the harbor, and we had our first sight of the ship while she was still quite far away, the first flash of white resolving gradually into tier upon tier of sails, as she made her way toward us. I tried to imagine what it had been like when there were no smokestacks behind her, no bridges, no other ships, no jetties, no buildings, no busy roads, no noise of engines, no airplanes overhead—when nothing of this kind had ever appeared on this stretch of water before. Eventually, the ship approached the pier, trailed by a flotilla of smaller vessels. Everyone on the beach was waving, the sun glittered on the sand. Then, suddenly, there was a puff of smoke at the Endeavour’s side and a hollow boom rang out across the bay. We all jumped—unprepared for cannon fire—and then laughed, realizing what it was.
Every day the imaginative leap required to comprehend such a journey becomes greater: to have sailed aboard a ship in the eighteenth century for years on end in uncharted waters, with only men for company, and the same ninety men at that, day in, day out, with nothing to eat but the sort of thing that could be kept salted or dried or gradually rotting in the hold for months at a time, with the ever-present possibility of shipwreck on some distant shore or death at the hands of some strange people, and still the cruel boredom of the daily routine.
I have, in my library, a book that describes the rhythm of a long Royal Navy voyage: decks scrubbed and swabbed at dawn, hammocks piped up at seven bells, hands piped to breakfast at eight. Then, at midday, the ceremony in which all the officers and midshipmen took the sun’s altitude. The master reported noon and the latitude to the officer of the watch. The officer of the watch, stepping across the quarterdeck and taking off his hat, reported it to the captain, who would reply, “Make it twelve, Mr. ________,” a ceremony so excessively ritualistic it would surely be mistaken for a religious event by an alien observer.
The same collection includes a children’s book that depicts an eighteenth-century man-o’-war in cross-section—not quite what Cook sailed in but not that different either. It shows where the sailors ate and where they slept, how many barrels of grog there were and how iron shot was stored near the keel to keep the ship from tipping over. A third describes the Endeavour in minute detail: her cables, her anchors, her cannons, her masts, how long she was, how broad, how deep, how much water she drew, how she behaved in a variety of winds. These are the sorts of things we are reduced to when we try to understand the past: picture books, diagrams, and models.
Inside the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, there is a half-scale model of a whaler so strangely proportioned that it makes you feel like Alice in Wonderland when she grew and grew and had to bend her head to keep from hitting the ceiling. I had heard that the full-scale replica of the Endeavour was similarly disconcerting. The height of a marine’s quarters on the lower deck was four feet seven inches; the cabins for the master, surgeon, gunner, and second and third lieutenants were barely five feet square. I wanted to see this for myself and I mentioned to Seven that, according to the ne
wspaper, they were going to be giving tours.
“You’ll come with me, won’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Oh, come on. Why not?”
“I don’t like boats.”
“What do you mean you don’t like boats? You come from the greatest seafaring people in the world. Besides, you’ve lived your whole life on the water.”
“I never liked them,” he said.
“Don’t be absurd. Anyway, the ship’s at anchor. We’re not going for a sail.”
“No,” he said, and that was the end of it.
Perhaps I should have known better than to ask. It was easy for me to romanticize the voyage, to cast myself in the role of explorer setting out for places unknown. Envisioning oneself as the object of discovery does not have quite the same appeal.
I went anyway by myself and bought a key ring and a T-shirt printed with the Endeavour logo, which Seven, to my surprise, appropriated for himself. I thought it looked good on him and said so.
“It’s a bit tight,” he said. “I think it shrunk.”
“No, it didn’t shrink,” I told him. “It’s a small. I didn’t have you in mind when I bought it. Still, it looks good. Kind of ironic though, isn’t it? I mean, the Endeavour and all.”
“I know,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if I should wear it.”
* * *
There was another ship, besides the Endeavour, that I often thought about in those days. Unlike Cook’s famous vessel, this one had almost escaped mention in most of the standard histories of New Zealand—a fact I found surprising since this, too, was a ship of “firsts.” It was not the first European vessel to visit to New Zealand, or the first to circumnavigate it, or the first to land a European who would, even temporarily, call New Zealand home. It was the first ship to leave a white woman in New Zealand—an Australian convict who arrived in the Bay of Islands in 1806, eight years before the first official white settlement, and who twice refused to be rescued by the British and American captains who offered to take her away. The ship was called the Venus and the convict was Charlotte Badger. I had come across a handful of references to the story, but the details were frustratingly sketchy. In the hope of uncovering more, I sent a letter to the research service at the Mitchell Library and one to the Archives Authority of New South Wales.
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 7
